- Author: Artefact
- Categories: Japan, News
- Date: Aug 17, 2011 14:11 JST
- Tags: 2ch, Bizarre, History, Hokkaido, Internet, Marketing, Politics, Tourism, Twitter, WWII

The mascot for an obscure Japanese town has caused a scandal after daring to say that Japan killed 20 million in a war of aggression, with 2ch and Japan’s online right banding together in a successful effort to silence him.
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Tokyo fuhrer Shintaro Ishihara has paid his annual respects to Japanese war criminals at Yasukuni, saying Japan’s current government “is not Japanese” for choosing to stay away.
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Joining the ranks of fellow Americans keen to joke about the misfortunes of the yellow races or ascribe racial guilt to the Japanese for Pearl Harbor/whaling/non-whiteness, Family Guy producer and writer Alec Sulkin has been caught pointing out that Japanese deaths don’t matter as their ancestors once bombed a naval base at Pearl Harbor.
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The BBC is cancelling some of its filming in Japan in response to the complaints of the Japanese embassy about a comedy programme which called a man who survived two atomic bomb blasts “unlucky.”
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The Japanese Embassy in London has issued a formal protest against the BBC for airing a programme daring to call a man who survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world’s unluckiest man.
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An elderly Japanese veteran’s recollection of how he ordered his men to use a Chinese prisoner as a target for bayonet drill, reasoning that the soldiers needed to develop some “backbone,” is proving highly controversial online.
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The Japanese government’s attempts to revise history textbooks to suggest Okinawan civilians were not butchered or forced into committing suicide by the Imperial Army to keep them out of American hands has run up against near unanimous opposition from Okinawans, surveys reveal.
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A US warship, the USS Blue Ridge, caused controversy as it docked at a Nagasaki harbor, despite refusal of entry from the mayor and regional governor.
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Unusually, a (popular) web comic has had an anime version announced, in what may be a first. Axis Powers ヘタリア / Axis Powers Hetalia is published on the author’s homepage (it should be said that the author, 日丸屋秀和 / Hidemaruya Hidekazu, does have experience as a professional mangaka), and is freely viewable, though a hardcopy manga version has also been published.
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